– By Caroline Falls –
Parking solutions app provider UbiPark has announced a collaboration to develop a mobility solution for Hertz Australia rental vehicles. Working together, UbiPark and Hertz Australia will explore how to enhance the customer experience, providing a simple and easy solution to help travellers get around unknown cities and destinations like a local.
“We’re excited to be working with Hertz, being one of the world’s largest vehicle rental companies. We are looking forward to collaborating with them to develop innovative mobility solutions, which address the parking and mobility pain points customers have when visiting a new location,” said Mosstyn Howell.
Howell quit his job in 2014 to establish Australia-based UbiPark, which now has more than 45,000 users and links to 7,000 parking stations in Australia. It’s up and running in Metro Parking and Care Park branded parking stations among others in Melbourne and Sydney. The app placed in the top three most downloaded transport apps in Australia recently after it launched its live Melbourne City street parking availability.
The collaboration with Hertz will explore how the rental car group can use the UbiPark suite of products to enhance its mobility solutions, helping customers search, navigate, access and pay for parking throughout Australia.
“Our customers travel frequently for business and leisure and are often time poor. We want to make it easier for them to search, navigate and access parking, to help our customers get from A to B as easily, and as quickly as possible,” said Eoin MacNeill, Vice President Asia-Pacific Hertz.
“By working with UbiPark, we can develop innovative solutions for Hertz customers to find and locate available parking at their desired destination.”
This hook-up will focus on how UbiPark can assist Hertz customers’ experience when renting a vehicle. Additionally, The Hertz Corporation owns the vehicle leasing and fleet management group Donlen, and Flexicar car sharing business in international markets.
Meanwhile, Howell said UbiPark is talking with fleet operators who are investigating ways to build the technology into their own platforms and save their drivers time searching for available parking spaces.
He said UbiPark had earlier this year finished developing functionality for the app to open parking station gates and process payments using a credit card. Howell said the payment platform is being trialled in seven locations in Australia’s two largest cities.
